Last week President Obama convened the Forum on Modernizing Government at the White House. Around 50 chief executive officers from companies such as United Airlines, Weyerhauser, John Deere & Co., and many others joined administration officials to discuss lessons from the private sector that could help the government modernize its information technology. I was privileged to attend, and I joined the breakout session on Maximizing Technology Return on Investment . The discussion was fascinating and I was scribbling notes the entire time. (You can see me with my head down in the back of the room for most of the video.)
I was most struck by the CEOs’ understanding of their IT strategy and investments. Each of them clearly knew where their big IT dollars were going, the status of those initiatives, and the business outcomes that each one supported. We CIOs love it when our customers provide clear business or mission priorities that we can use to align our investments and projects!
Other comments that stood out in my session:
- Keep it simple. Customization is expensive and risky. Use off-the-shelf components and simplify your business processes to use the out-of-the-box capabilities.
- Plan on deployment cycles no longer than eighteen months long. Focus on what you can deliver in 18 months or less. If it takes longer than that, the new features are likely to be obsolete. Successive cycles can build on one another but keep individual project durations short.
- Clarity is critical. Understand the customer you are serving, define (and simplify) your processes, be precise about what business functions your project addresses. A lack of clarity is a critical project risk.
- Resist the temptation to tackle the core, mission-critical legacy systems all at once. Pick off subfunctions, modernize those, and work around the edges. Eventually you will get the whole beast modernized.
- Culture is an under-appreciated project factor. Every organization has a culture that affects risk tolerance and openness to change. Factor that into your planning and execution to increase your odds of success.
- IT enables business and mission success, but IT does not own the business/mission strategy and performance goals. Those must be driven from the top down in order to succeed.
Many of these points seem to be common sense, but it was refreshing to hear them from corporate leaders who have many other demands on their time. The fact that they showed up so informed and shared openly with us was a pleasure.
5) President’s Forum on IT Modernization
John on 1/20/2010 21:50:31
I agree that keeping it simple is a better idea for it will cost a lot if you customize it further. But other than that, the quality should not be sacrifice. Would that be possible?
4) re: President’s Forum on IT Modernization
Casey Coleman on 1/21/2010 8:26:39
No doubt, quality should not be sacrificed. And public sector requirements do not always map to existing COTS solutions. But we are not as unique as we often first believe, and it’s worth challenging any customization requests upfront. I have found that what is most common is that everyone performing a similar business process will have slight variations in their practices and they would like the software to map exactly to their personal or team approach. You lose all economies of scale that way, and in fact you lose some quality if the data is not consistent. It is very hard work to get agreement upfront on business processes, but that is the only way to succeed with large scale enterprise IT initiatives.
3) President’s Forum on IT Modernization
Brand Niemann on 2/5/2010 16:16:27
I would like to see us pilot having government employees “put their desktop in the cloud” as not only a way to save infrastrucuture costs and increase collaboration, but also a way to preserve the artifacts of their careeer so when they retire the people have a record! I asked NARA if they liked this suggestion and they said they had been thinking about the same idea.
2) President’s Forum on IT Modernization
Brand Niemann on 2/11/2010 9:59:03
My suggestions is at { Link }
1) President’s Forum on IT Modernization
John Able on 2/12/2010 9:32:57
A rare and enlightened view from the top, but there is one comment that invalidates most of the rest of what you write: “. . . IT does not own the business/mission strategy and performance goals. Those must be driven from the top down in order to succeed. ” I agree that IT creating and executing the IT vision is a classic example of the train running the railroad. In most agencies, IT wins because leaders generally lack interest in and knowledge of technology. But top-down technology solutions from those same technophobes at the top poses even greater dangers and is largely to blame for all the other issues you warn about.
The answer to these problems will be for management to provide virtual technology laboratories running outside secure government data networks — only a small percentage of data needs to be secured on secure networks — and move the rest (data and processes) into the public cloud where bottom-up design will allow government workers AND the public to collaborate (mainly using open source software) to get the work done and make it transparent and usable by anyone who has an interest.